The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
To improve fuel efficiency, vehicle manufacturers have introduced various control technologies to be utilized for a vehicle's deceleration stage, such as regenerative control and fuel-cut control based on road environments and/or the input of the deceleration by a driver. The interest in an apparatus and a method for controlling a coasting operation is continuously increased. Recently, efforts to develop vehicles to travel the maximum distance while consuming the minimum fuel consumption through the coasting operation have been made in various vehicle industries.
The coasting operation is a driving mode to gradually decelerate a vehicle speed using driving energy of a vehicle while it runs without any acceleration input from a driver. When a hybrid vehicle performs the coasting operation, the hybrid vehicle may charge a battery with power using a motor. Accordingly, the coasting operation is an important factor to increase charging efficiency and fuel efficiency.
According to the related art, to control such a coasting operation, a simple map-based manner is used to map a front vehicle to a distance. Since the front vehicle is simply mapped to the distance, the coasting operation may not be accurately controlled, a large quantity of mapping time is required, and logic is complicated.